Yeah, I’m wading into this. It’s my first post on this blog in quite a while and I’m going after misinformation about Tesla. I am committing a large number of Internet sins here, so let’s get them all out of the way in a hurry.
- I am arguing about a topic on the Internet.
- I am contradicting “common wisdom” about a popular subject.
- I, a staunchly left-wing person, am challenging a sacred cow of many members of the U.S. left, risking excommunication.
- I am daring to offer support for a wealthy person and/or the companies they founded (who, admittedly, do not need my help in any way).
- I have a belief, however futile, that laying all this stuff out might change someone’s mind.
In short, I am wasting my time and probably yours. However, I feel like this is worthwhile for one and only one reason: I cannot stand misinformation, especially when it is willful and promoted by people who are ostensibly on the side of factual reality.
If some right-winger comes up to me and yells that Joe Biden and the Fascist Commie Democrats are conspiring to take away meat, I can ignore them because arguing with a brick wall is pointless. We all know that they aren’t interested in facts or even reality, so why worry about it? But like I said, I expect better from my own team.
Before we move on, some obligatory disclaimers:
- I do not represent Tesla.
- I am not a member of the press or an employee of any financial institution.
- I do not own any Tesla stock and have no plans to purchase any.
- I do not own a Tesla, although I hope to soon.
- I have no financial relationship and no conflicts of interest with Tesla or any Tesla owner or investor.
- I am writing this entirely of my own volition, as a layman, and am receiving no compensation for it.
Where did this come from?
Yeah, it’s a Twitter thread. The poster is Joshua Potash, an ardent Democratic activist and someone whose views I… well, I respect him in many ways and do not respect him in others, but that’s not the point of this.
I don’t know how to explain it but Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Joe Rogan are all selling you the same bullshit
It’s like gentrified neoliberalism. The facade has gotten a little better, but it’s the same crap underneath. Plus they all play into anti-intellectualism, especially Rogan and Musk. The “do your own research” stuff. And if you think it’s unfair to put Yang here, he’s a
Trojan horse for implementing some of the most nefarious hyper-neoliberal policies in our biggest city, setting a dangerous precedent. He’s convinced people that he’s the UBI candidate, but his UBI proposal is bs, and he wants to dismantle so much of our social safety net.
https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1387834381423849477
As for Rogan and Yang, sure. I think Rogan is a blowhard who revels in his ignorance and Yang has some really out of touch economic ideas. If you’re looking at Elon Musk purely for his political opinions, then we’re probably done here because he’s not my favorite in that area either: a little too techbro libertarian and a little too covidiot, at least early on. (In fairness, a lot of us thought the pandemic would be over sooner than it was because we underestimated how fucking stupid people are, but I digress.)
I’m also not here to argue about whether colonizing Mars is a good idea. I think it’s an inevitable part of our future and the benefits of doing so far outweigh the risks, but I have my doubts about whether the ideas Musk has for governing it stand a chance of working out. He’s a little too into Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for my taste. However, in the process of getting to Mars, SpaceX is reducing the cost of access to space by orders of magnitude, which will benefit us all in immeasurable ways.
Again, that’s not what I want to talk about. The real fun started when Tesla entered the conversation and the lies began. You know, the usual stuff. “Tesla is a fraud.” “The cars are unsafe.” “They’re taking unconscionable risks with self-driving.”
Someone actually linked the Twitter account @TeslaFraud, which is part of an organized conspiracy against the company. Dubbed “TSLAQ”, it’s documented by Whole Mars Blog far better than I could, so please go there if you want the full scoop. The point is that these people have a financial interest in spreading misinformation about Tesla to drive down the stock price so they can profit by short-selling it. Almost any negative story you may find is either created or amplified by them or their followers in the media.
It’s important to remember that Tesla is a disruptive innovator that is cutting into the market share of existing automakers and explicitly threatening the dominance of the oil industry. It’s made two of the most powerful enemies on the planet: Big Oil and Big Auto. As left-wing advocates, we’re supposed to be against them but in this one specific case we lap up their propaganda.
Then someone else linked a long Twitter thread starting with the premise “Teslas are bad cars. Here are a few reasons why.” I wasn’t going to try to refute the points it makes step by step, but you know what? Let’s go.
The Rebuttal
The primary reason they’re bad is they’re made by a shitty manufacturer that sells a garbage product at luxury prices, so you get all the ownership inconveniences of a luxury vehicle without actually owning one.
Umm. Crap. I was going to use facts to refute assertions of fact, but this is not an assertion of fact. It’s an opinion with no facts to back it up. I guess I can cite InsideEVs reporting on the 2020 Consumer Reports owner satisfaction survey, which Tesla has won for the past four years. This is not off to a good start.
So your basically buying something that requires expensive handmade parts that take ages to ship, has limited service options and could spend months in a shop for basic repairs but had the build quality of a Geo Metro.
Okay, a point that is sort of true, although still worded in an unnecessarily inflammatory way. Tesla has had service issues since its inception for several reasons, including its rapid pace of growth and the fact that it can’t rely on traditional auto dealers and repair shops. It’s literally a new technology. Service is growing as fast as it can but delays of weeks or months are not unheard of. It’s not because of “handmade parts”, though.
Actually, I think I know where that one came from. Early in the production ramps of Model 3 and Model Y, various issues arose that required workarounds before new parts could be brought into production. These include low-quality cladding and tape on some parts. These were widely reported but those issues are long past.
Overall, Tesla vehicles are in the top tier of reliability, requiring far less routine maintenance than internal combustion cars. This is a property they share with most other electric vehicles. Tesla owners have gone for hundreds of thousands of miles with no breakdowns, but there have also been some spectacular, albeit anecdotal quality control issues.
So the problem with this assertion is that, while it references true things, it construes them in the worst possible way and ignores valid counterpoints.
This is why new Teslas often rattle, have serious wind noise issues and almost constant paint problems. It’s because the manufacturing is often rushed and generally inconsistent. Straightforwardly, whatever you think of their design they are often poorly built.
This one just goes back to the last point, so what I’ll add is that these problems have been addressed and build quality issues improved on steadily over time. I don’t have a direct citation for this, but I can reference Sandy Munro’s Model Y teardown, in which he compared the quality of that vehicle to the Model 3 that he first looked at.
This is why, regardless of whatever press they get or the impression you get from Elon Musk defenders, actual owners complain about them all the time. A recent JD Power reliability survey ranked them last among all auto brands. 250 complaints for every 100 sold.
(Tesla refused to provide owner data for that survey, which was done by other means, so that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence they would have done better otherwise)
The JD Power survey was questioned by many Tesla supporters and independent observers, but it’s not on Tesla to refute claims like that; it’s on the surveyors to use proper methodology. In particular, it made no distinction between complaints about minor fit-and-finish issues and complaints about genuine safety or reliability issues. Inspections of luxury vehicles by competing manufacturers have found similar issues, so the problem is that Tesla is being singled out for particular criticism. Also, see the Consumer Reports survey I linked above.
The design itself though is hardly stellar. You know what happens when you get a golfball-sized dent in the undercarriage of a Tesla? It’s totaled. Because the batteries are welded into that plate, so if the dent is too big to pound out you have to rip out the electrics to fix it
Umm.. citation needed? Replacing a battery on a Tesla requires a shop but it’s not a “totaled” event, and the underbody plate is there to prevent battery damage from things striking it. This is a case where I can’t directly refute the claim because it offers nothing to refute. I can’t prove a negative other than to say that if there were systematic issues like this, it would have made more news articles and/or attracted NHTSA scrutiny.
You know how to get out of a Model 3 if the electric system dies? Of course you don’t, because you can’t. Opening the doors on a depowered Tesla ranges from comically obscure to literally impossible depending on the model. A common reason to depower? A battery fire.
This is simply false. Most Model 3s have an identical manual door release latch, and the car automatically releases the door locks on a crash. As vehicle fires are very rare in Teslas (10x less than gas vehicles), this smells like the same logic that says you shouldn’t wear a seat belt because of the risk of being trapped in your car if it gets jammed. Anyway, the doors operate off of the 12V circuit so a main battery fire would still allow enough power to be present to use the release controls.
One of Tesla’s nasty little not-so-secrets. Years ago whistleblowers in the company let people know of serious issues with a battery coolant system that was prone to corrosion and leaks. The coolant itself wasn’t flammable. Until it dried, anyway. Then it was.
Tesla responded to this by smearing the whistleblowers and burying the issue, which its never been clear they resolved.
Citation needed. Again. Is this the “whistleblower” Martin Tripp, against whom Tesla won a lawsuit for sabotage and hacking, while losing his countering defamation suit? It has now been proven in court that Tripp was lying in almost every respect. If it’s something else, then do us the grace of tossing in a link.
Also, battery fires 10x lower than gas fires, etc., etc. See above.
Tesla also makes grand claims about the autopilot systems. At least, they do when they’re selling them, playing it up like it’s practically a self-driving car. When they talk to state DMVs they very much describe them as “driver assistance programs.”
The autopilot system is little more than a clever toy, at worst lulling drivers into a false sense of security. It’s why Tesla is so quick to note the feature wasn’t being used whenever there’s a wreck. They want you to know it’s the driver’s fault their car turned into a bonfire
Again, this seems like anecdotal data since there has never been, to my knowledge, any large-scale claim against Tesla for falsely advertising the capabilities of its Autopilot software. It’s possible that some sales employees spoke improperly, but I was lied to by the dealer about the reliability of a used car I bought a few years back, so again why is Tesla getting singled out?
Autopilot and Full Self-Driving come with copious warning labels, an on-screen prompt before it can be activated, visual and audio reminders if you use it improperly, and so on. Is it perfect? No. But there is no evidence that has ever been brought before a court or a regulatory body that Tesla is misrepresenting what the software can do and how to use it safely.
Tesla did lose a court case in Germany about the “Autopilot” branding, but that argument relies on a definition of the term that does not match its usage in other industries nor its historical usage in the auto industry. The first commercial cruise control system was branded “Auto-Pilot”. That may not be a great example because a lot of crashes occurred early on when people didn’t understand that it couldn’t drive for them. However, I don’t recall that automakers were blamed for this.
The point is that there is no evidence that anyone actually believes that Autopilot can drive the car without human attention, only that they might hypothetically believe it.
As for the fire thing, we’re back on Houston, are we? If someone claims that Autopilot drove the car into a tree and it is then conclusively proven that Autopilot did not do that, why are we still having a conversation? Drive a gas car into a tree at 100 mph and see what happens. That crash is still under investigation, so claiming to know exactly what happened is a plain lie.
A lot of people while say of course, it’s a new car, a new TYPE of car, these problems will be resolved over time. But Tesla as a company has been around since 2003 and other, more established manufacturers produce all-electric vehicles without anything like this number of issues
Oh, my. This is funny. Volkswagen recently had thousands of ID.3s sitting in lots for months waiting for a software fix. Look up recalls and defects in other electric vehicles. It’s so simple to disprove this claim that I’m almost embarrassed to have to reply.
Nissan has sold about 500,000 Nissan Leafs worldwide The only story of one catching fire that I found was from 2015. A wrecked Tesla burned for 4 solid hours just eight days ago.
Please do some basic research. It did not burn for 4 hours. It took firefighters 3 minutes to extinguish it. Due to the circumstances of the crash (human fatalities) they were unable to move the vehicle to expose the battery pack and so they had to spend several more hours cooling it until the chemical reactions ceased. The fire chief himself debunked the claim.
Also, Tesla has sold well over a million cars worldwide, but congratulations to Nissan for doing well with their batteries. That’s a good thing. Can’t say the same for all brands.
And yeah, those kind of fires are still rare occurrences. But it’s a rare occurrence other manufacturers have mostly resolved. But Tesla hasn’t. Because they don’t give a shit, and trust their cult-like level of hype to plaster over their garbage product’s problems.
And if you’re unwilling to admit there are problems they don’t get fixed, whether you’re an egomaniac CEO or a pack of devoted fanboys who want to justify paying Mercedes prices for a cheaply made gadget.
The first tweet is opinion, not a rebuttable fact, even as it concedes that Tesla fires are “rare occurrences”, contradicting itself. The second is an ad-hominem personal attack and thus not a valid point. I could call this person a cowardly spreader of toxic lies, but it wouldn’t improve my arguing position despite being true.
The rest of the thread is mostly whining about counterpoints and contains nothing factual to discuss. If the poster doesn’t want to buy a Tesla, that’s their choice.
Conclusion
Right, that’s two hours of my life wasted. I went into this thinking there would be more factual points to debate but really it’s “I don’t like Tesla” combined with a bunch of partial truths and easily rebutted lies. Oh, well. Time to get some sleep.
lementalia 